Better Batteries through Simulation

With all the HPC conference I attend, the prospect of a better battery for my laptop and cameras is something I would really appreciate. Now, MIT researchers are using TACC’s Ranger supercomputer to investigate new material for high-density energy storage.

Most of our world is concerned with the organic chemistry of sustaining our lives. But most of the Earth – in fact most of the universe – is made up of inorganic materials formed by geological or cosmological processes. Despite their variety, all inorganic materials are composed of a not-so-terribly-large number of inorganic compounds: 50,000 to 200,000 depending on how you count. People have been studying these materials for millennium, but less than one percent of these have had their properties explored. Gerbrand Ceder, professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), aims to change that. You don’t want to calculate the elastic quotient of 50,000 materials in your head, but it’s not impossible for the world’s most powerful supercomputers, Ceder says. He estimates that the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center could calculate a given property for all known compounds in 80 hours, and Ranger is just one of a pantheon of powerful systems in the U.S.

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Industry Perspectives

Over at the IBM Blog, IBM Fellow Hillary Hunter writes that the company anticipates that the world’s volume of digital data will exceed 44 zettabytes, an astounding number. "IBM has worked to build the industry’s most complete data science platform. Integrated with NVIDIA GPUs and software designed specifically for AI and the most data-intensive workloads, IBM has infused AI into offerings that clients can access regardless of their deployment model. Today, we take the next step in that journey in announcing the next evolution of our collaboration with NVIDIA. We plan to leverage their new data science toolkit, RAPIDS, across our portfolio so that our clients can enhance the performance of machine learning and data analytics." [Read More...]

White Papers

XTREME-D’s next step in offering seamless HPC/DA/DL computing is the XTREME-Stargate gateway platform, or cluster portal. This on-prem device acts as a cluster “head node” and provides secure and fast access to bare-metal clusters that are configured using enhanced XTREME-DNA technology. Download the full paper to learn more about how XTREME-Stargate offers a “super head node” for HPC cloud clusters.